How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents essays

How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents essays In her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Julie Alvarez presents the reader with a series of 15 interlocking stories that narrate the difficulties of growing up bicultural in the United States. The Garcia girls are Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Sofia, though Alvarez speaks most through Yolanda's narrative. They Garcia girls were born in the Dominican Republic and move to the United States as children. The book opens in 1989, with the Garcia girls are American adults. The narrative then flows backward, tracing the transition the girls had to make as they strive to create an identity that is both Latina and American. As implied in the title, language plays a vital role in the transculturalization of the Garcia girls, into their assimilation into American popular culture. The acquisition of English language skills as well as American argot was a vital step in the Garcia girls' forging of their dual identity. Their struggle with the language is symbolic of each sister's struggle to create a cohesive cultural identity that blends their For the Garcia girls, the manner of speech, how they sound as they talk, matter as much as their grasp of the English language. The stories are told in first person narratives, showing how every member of the immigrant Garcia family struggles to tell their stories using the inadequate vocabulary, the incomprehensible grammar and the jagged voice In the novel, the Garcia girls see Spanish as the mother tongue, which represents their refuge (72). In contrast, English is more than a difficult second language. For the members of the Garcia family, the sheer difficulty of mastering the English language is a constant reminder of their alienation. Their accents brand the Garcia girls as strangers in a This alienation is particularly evident in the story "Tre ...